Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category

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The pencilguin

August 10, 2025

Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):


(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one

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Posted in Eggcorns, Furnishings and tools, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

A lesson in abstraction (and role reversal)

August 10, 2025

Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro cartoon, in which the roles of ordinary life are Bizarro-reversed:


(#1) Those are living, breathing inkblots sitting in the chairs: a therapist inkblot showing a picture to a client inkblot; where you expect people, you get inkblot entities, and where you expect the picture of an inkblot, you get the picture of a person (in the title panel and the main panel, there are a ton of odd symbols; if you’re puzzled by them, see this Page)

Abstracting away from the details, we’re looking at two instances of the situation XXY:

— XXY: a situation in which three entities — two Xs (a therapist and a client) and a Y — are participants in an event in which the therapist X shows a reproduction of a Y to the client X

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Posted in Comic conventions, Events, Figurative language, Inversion, Linguistics in the comics, Participant roles, Semantics | Leave a Comment »

Lost in an uncrowd

August 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for August — and 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day 🇨🇭 (I am of course wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts — with a bright red FAGGOT tank top, to be sure, but I am sporting the flag of my forefathers)

Today’s (Piccolo & Price) Rhymes With Orange strip depends on the viewer identifying the main character, the one who says he wants to go someplace busy and crowded, as a pop-cultural figure known for losing himself in crowds:


British Wally / American Waldo, uncomfortable out in the open, with only one other person close to him

My 8/3/13 posting “The Weinerfest rolls on” has a section on the Where’s Wally / Waldo? books, with this Wikipedia note:

The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally’s distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain “red herrings” involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.

So of course he’s uneasy, sitting in such an exposed spot.

Thanks to his distinctive garb, Waldo is a frequent subject of cartoons. My 2/17/18 posting “Tell them you haven’t seen him” has a sampling of 4 of them.

 

 

Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Two footballs, passing in the night

July 30, 2025

Very briefly (it’s been a hellish day). In my comics feed for today, penultimate July, Mark Parisi’s off the mark cartoon of 7/16/25, in which an AmE football and a BrE football fail to hook up with a sportsball of their own kind — next to one another in a bar.

In the RomCom version, of course, they go on to find satisfaction in hooking up with (aka dating) one another, in the thrill of the new and different.

Otherwise, you see the pitfalls of dating through text only; if they communicated by voice, they’d get nationality information. (Though in the real world, a British football would know that such a brown sportsball was called a football in the US. Whether an American football could be depended upon to know that a soccer ball was called a football in the UK is not so clear to me.)

 

 

Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Reading signs

July 27, 2025

Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):


(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by

So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.

Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.

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Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Now Playing on A.I. Radio

July 26, 2025

A new intricately playful Bizarro series (by Wayno) began on 7/14, with two word boxes, a supertitle Now Playing on A.I. Radio and a regular title; the regular title is a play on the name of a musical group that you might hear on the radio, but with the name altered as if it had been retrieved by a somewhat loopy associative AI program; and with an image that illustrates the goofy name. And then Wayno supplies a further jokey title that’s a play on a further name or title connected in some way with the cartoon. The series, with all of these moving parts, was still going today, 7/26.

Here I bring you the second and third strips, from 7/15 (Wu-Tang Clam) and 7/16 (Bob Marley and a Whaler). Today it’s The Mamas and the Pupas, and I’m one happy cartumer (ok, ok, cartoon consumer).

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Posted in Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Does your hot dog talk?

July 19, 2025

Today’s Zippy strip:


(#1) I choose to understand hot dog in this context as a sexual metaphor, so I’m both enchanted and appalled by the idea of a world of talking hot dogs, all in conversations with one another (I am famously fond of penises, but still); meanwhile, Yocco’s was a feature of the sociocultural landscape of my childhood (in an area of Pennsylvania Dutch country much influenced by Philadelphia both linguistically and culinarily), though I early on cleaved to Nathan’s hot dogs (Coney Island wasn’t all that far away), as I still do

My own metaphorical hot dog (mhd for short)  is highly expressive, but (blessedly) not at all chatty. Though if my mhd could speak, it would have something of a (now old-fashioned) Philadelphia accent — with back notes of Pennsylvania Dutch English and a significant overlay of NYC Yinglish.

My mhd, like Yocco’s hot dog, has a crown (technically, a glans penis), but it has no discernible facial features, and certainly no mustache, that would be kinky.

Now, about Yocco’s.

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Posted in Language and food, Language of advertising, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

Day of the bed scorpions

July 11, 2025

On Facebook yesterday, George V. Reilly passed on an assortment of Joe Dator cartoons that the artist is selling the originals of. From these, one instantly made me laugh out loud at its preposterousness:


(#1) Plagued by pests? Bring in a predator to kill them off! | Got bugs? Scorpions zap bugs! | Bed bug infestation? Bed scorpions will do the trick!| It’s just common sense, right? (cartoon from The American Bystander)

No, wait, wait! That’s not what we had in mind! Dator just took simple reasoning and followed it wherever it led, even to an absurd situation, like scorpions in a bed.

Two more. I expect bed scorpions to give me the willies for some time to come. Meanwhile, two more of Dator’s offerings, now from the world of dining out.

Who gets which order? The framing event is the everyday one of a server in a diner connecting each customer to the dish they ordered. The absurdity lies in neither customer being from our everyday world and each being most unlikely to be eating in a diner, and then in there being no establishment, anywhere, in which these two would be eating together:


(#2) The nominal odd couple, the Tower of London yeoman and the formicavore edentate — the beefeater and the anteater — united by the form of their names (indicating their presumable preferences in comestibles), but nothing else (unpublished cartoon)

Not my order! The framing event is again an everyday one, a server who’s gotten an order wrong. But, well, nobody expects the Great Wall of China:


(#3) Of course he should send it back — but you can’t help wondering what the service platter was like (published in the New Yorker on 12/23/24)

There are more, equally preposterous. But I vowed to stop at three.

(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings on Joe Dator cartoons.)

Posted in Cartoonists, Language and food, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Names | Leave a Comment »

Blend and chill, witches will

June 20, 2025

The cold hags of summer cackle over a cauldron of fresh vegetables in this Roz Chast cartoon from the 6/23/25 New Yorker:


The Three Chilled Sisters crush and grind, crush and grind

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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Seasons | Leave a Comment »

Everyone’s a crinoid nowadays

June 9, 2025

We filter stuff flowing past us, consider this material, and evaluate its worth. As here:


(#1) Neocrinus, a stalked living crinoid species similar to those found in the Paleozoic (from Brian N. Tissot’s website, “Curious Creatures of the California Coast: Crinoids”, from 12/31/13); from Wikipedia:

Crinoids are marine invertebrates that make up the class Crinoidea. Crinoids that remain attached to the sea floor by a stalk in their adult form are commonly called sea lilies, while the unstalked forms, called feather stars or comatulids, are members of the largest crinoid order, Comatulida. Crinoids are echinoderms in the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes the starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers.

… Crinoids are passive suspension feeders, filtering plankton and small particles of detritus from the sea water flowing past them with their feather-like arms.

Oh, not crinoid, silly man; on Facebook, commenting on my posting from yesterday, “Today’s  bilingual jest”, Gadi Niram seemed to think it was clitic, but that was just a joke; really, the saying is that everyone’s a critic nowadays (or some similar piece of wisdom about the prevalence of unfavorable opinions coming from all quarters).

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Posted in Books, Clitics, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »

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